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Raised Bed: How to Fill and Save 60% on Soil Costs

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If you have super tall raised beds in your garden or just a lot of raised beds, then it can get pretty expensive to fill it with the perfect raised bed mix. Until now. Adam here from yard of paradise where it’s my goal to help you grow a greener thumb, but on a budget.

Utilize Hugelkultur

Hugelkultur. It’s a German concept. So the trick of this method to half the cost of your soil or more depending on how you do it, is to understand how a lot of plants’ root systems grow. Most of them aren’t getting too much further than 12 to 18 inches down. At least many of these annual vegetables that everyone likes to grow in our gardens. And so in a 30 inch bed, which means what will you do down? What are you going to fill it up with? Well, if you use the method, you’re going to fill it up with organic matter like logs, but it doesn’t have to be optimal.

Fill with Organic Matter

Organic matter like sticks, long logs, brush, twigs, grass clippings and unfinished partially finished compost. Sometimes I throw in a bunch of vegetable trimmings. There’s many things you can do. So, what you’re doing is you’re basically cutting our soil cost in half or more. You might even fill up to about the 60% mark here.

Layer with High-Quality Soil Mix

So if about 50 or 60% of the bed is now organic fill material, then what are you using right above? It’s a great question. You can go cheap or you can go pretty expensive here.

  • So you could go to something like Mel’s Mix. That’d be 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3, about four or five sources of blended compost. That’s probably your highest end option. 
  • You could also do something like 50% topsoil, 25% compost, 25% other sources of organic matter, horse manure, cow manure, things like that.
  • You could go with a bagged mix. I like to use Espoma Organics Raised Bed Mix on the top. And sometimes I like to use a bagged mix just because that’s more accessible.

How I Fill My Raised Bed

I’ll tell you how I fill it up and then fill the top off. So I gather my garden random debris, some flowering brassicas, some dirt, some grass, some leaves and stuff. But it’s not enough. I need to get up about 50% of the raised bed. So what I’d like to do is use my passive compost pile and shovel a bunch of that in here. Or you can make it even cheaper by putting in the larger wooden products like your logs, your sticks and your twigs. And then I’ll top it off. Once we get to about 50%-60% or so with the rest of that high quality mix. The beauty of this is that every single scoop that I didn’t have to buy. And  If you’re doing a big pruning job in the backyard, some grass clippings, this passively composted pile is going to be absolutely perfect. And we have about, I would say 40% of this left to fill. So before the light gets too low, let’s go ahead and do that.

Like I said, I like to use the Espoma Organic 1.5 cubic foot raised bed mix. It’s fantastic. And the thing is I probably have to use a little bit less than half as many of these bags. So I get to use the rest of it in some other part of my garden and save more money. We have about an inch or two of a lip because we want a mulch layer on top after we plant this out to have a nice protective layer on top of the high quality mix.

Guys, it’s really that simple. Like I said, long logs, larger volumes of organic matter are going to be really nice because they fill up more space at an even lower cost in the bottom. And those will break down eventually. They’re going to become home for bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, all sorts of different things that eventually will become the soil in your raised bed. And as you grow in something like this, it’s going to sink. It’ll maybe sink two, three inches in a year, maybe the first year, slightly more. And what you’ll do is you’ll just top dress with some more compost and mulch over the top of that. So it’s really just that easy.

Conclusion

So it’s really that easy, guys. I would love to know if you have a creative method. If you found this article helpful, please give it a review and share it with your friends. Stay in touch with us for more fantastic gardening tips and outdoor inspiration.

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